10 Benefits of Using Magento 2 for your eCommerce Store

The ever-evolving world of eCommerce has seen remarkable changes over the past year or year and a half. Statistics state that global retail eCommerce sales reached nearly $4.3 trillion, which spiked to approximately $5.2 trillion in 2021 and is expected to reach $5.4 trillion in 2022.

The eCommerce trend is not fading anytime soon.

“Online payment will continue to pay an ever-growing and significant role in the development of eCommerce as well as the stimulation of consumer demand.” –Lucy Peng, Co-founder of Alibaba

Hence, if you are planning on starting a business, owning an eCommerce store is the perfect option. For an eCommerce store to function seamlessly and profitably, you need to ensure that it is built on the right eCommerce platform.

So,

What is an eCommerce Platform?

An eCommerce platform is an end-to-end software solution allowing retailers to manage and operate their businesses.

eCommerce platforms are categorised into 3-

·         Hosted Platforms: Popularly used, the hosted platforms (such as Shopify and BigCommerce) are usually owned by a company that gives users access to use their tools and templates to create their own stores. Easy to set up, these stores come with in-built features including payment processing and shipping. However, the drawback of using hosted platforms is that you won’t be able to customise as much as you please.

·     Self-hosted Platforms: These platforms are the ones that are hosted on your server, for example, Adobe Commerce (Magento) and WooCommerce. Unlike hosted platforms, the self-hosted ones offer more flexibility to customise an online store, but it also requires more technical knowledge for set up.

·      Hybrid Platforms: As the name implies, hybrid platforms are a mix of hosted and self-hosted platforms, for example, Shopify Plus. These platforms provide the flexibility of self-hosted platforms and the easy usage of hosted platforms.

In this blog, we will explore the top 10 benefits of using Magento 2 for running an eCommerce store.

Let’s dive in!

What is Magento?

Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform that has a global network of more than 315,000 developers and is used by over 250,000 merchants, facilitating over $155 billion in gross annual merchandise volume.

Magento 2, the revolutionised version of Magento 1 is one of the highly preferred and robust eCommerce platforms preferred by small, mid-sized, and enterprise businesses. The prime objective behind releasing Magento 2 was to enhance user experience compared to Magento 1. Equipped with advanced features that help deliver a high-quality shopping experience to customers, Magento 2 is faster to load, easier to use, offers enhanced security features and is highly customisable.

10 Benefits of Using Magento 2 for your eCommerce Platform

1.      Enhanced Performance and Scalability: Magento 2 comes with a modified indexer to enhance query performance. The indexer updates data regularly that includes catalogue data, prices, users, and stores, enhancing the overall speed of your online store. Magento 2’s core integration with Varnish Cache, a leading HTTP accelerator technology, allows you to provide full-page caching for your online store that in turn speeds the web page loading. Reports show that if a web page takes more than 3 seconds to load, it increases the bounce rate to as much as 50%. This is why Magento 2’s fast loading times are extremely beneficial to users. It provides customers with a seamless shopping experience.

2.  Customer Relationship: Another big advantage of using Magento 2 is that it offers several upsells and cross-sells to improve the user shopping experience, thereby enhancing order value potential. You can not only utilise the upsell and cross-sell features, stock availability, and add free gifts and coupons but also can add promotions to checkout pages that can enhance the sales potential, reducing the cart abandonment rates. Other than promotions and cross-selling, Magento 2 also offers other easy features to add media such as appealing videos to attract more customers to your store.

3.     Robust Platform: If you own massive merchandise then Magento 2 is the perfect option for you to handle all your eCommerce needs, including the ability to process large orders, manage large inventory effectively, and offer multiple leading payment gateways.

Did you know that Magento 2 can process 39% more orders per hour compared to Magento 1 and its page loading time is 50% faster too?

4.     Mobile Friendliness: Customers these days prefer shopping on-the-go. Reports show that approximately 62% of smartphone users make online purchases on their mobile devices. Therefore, eCommerce companies should ensure that their online stores are mobile-friendly to provide easy accessibility to shoppers. Magento’s mobile responsiveness provides a mobile-friendly checkout experience to the shoppers wherein Magento 2 comes with additional mobile responsive design themes for you to design and execute sites that can be viewed by all devices, on different screen resolutions. Besides, Magento 2’s admin pane is touch-screen friendly and your store’s entire catalogue is easy to navigate.

5.      Advanced SEO Features: Organic search is a great means to drive traffic to a website. Hence, it is crucial to own a well-optimised website. Magento 2 offers all the advanced SEO features you need as it was designed keeping SEO in mind. It allows merchants to design SEO-friendly URLs, meta-implementation throughout the website, introduce rich snippets that allow merchants to define mark-up on product pages, set up and optimise XML sitemaps and multiple marketing features that help boost your page ranking on the search engine.

6.      Large Community: We know that Magento is an open-source platform with several developers and businesses across the globe. The availability of the huge community ensures support, development, and customisation where you can enjoy constant support and an expansive library of third-party extensions to add any functionality to the online stores. This means you can customise your store as per your preference. Some of the popular integrations include popular payment gateways like PayPal. Sage Pay, etc. and marketing tools including MailChimp and Nosto, along with other popular web applications.

7.      Security Features: Magento allows you to customise various levels of security permissions starting from login screens with Google reCAPTCA to a secondary password, PCI Data Security as standard, and several other security advantages that are extremely beneficial to the developers. This protects your store from unwanted security breaches and site attacks. At the same time, two-factor authentication adds an extra layer of protection to the Magento store. To stop intruders, you can choose a custom path and use an SSL to secure all the web pages which would provide customers with confidence while shopping from your store. At the same time, Magento monitors the security of the platform and releases new security patches from time to time to help plug any kind of susceptibility into the platform. With the tools and documentation, merchants and developers can protect their online stores.

8.      Marketplace Integration: Integration with marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay is easy with Magento 2. Retailers can create an omnichannel experience to allow the products and services to reach a wider audience.

9.      Better Search Options: Magento 2’s intelligent search features help enhance the user experience by providing the option to filter products using different search filters and parameters. Magento also uses specific search term clouds, product reviews, recently viewed products, product tags, and more to help merchants customise each search term with auto-suggested terms.

10. Multiple Customisations: Different businesses offer different products and services to their customers and are hence unique in their style and brand. To stand out in the crowd, you need to ensure that you can customise your website as per your requirements. Magento 2 comes with easy installation of themes, extensions and custom development that would meet your business needs. Since this platform is flexible and customisable, you can implement a One-step checkout process by eliminating several checkout steps that would allow your customers the ease to checkout quickly, reducing the page abandonment rate. Other user-friendly features like quick view, provision for foreign currencies and languages to expand across the globe, ability to manage multiple stores in one place and more are some of the added advantages of using Magento 2.

Wrapping Up,

With Magento, customers will have an access to a beautifully designed, user-friendly shopping experience with an easy checkout process and relevant search results. The enhanced scalability and performance coupled with testing capabilities and fast loading times are an added advantage for developers.

These features make Magento 2 the perfect eCommerce platform for businesses of any size.

If you are interested in building your online store using Magento 2, ensure that you

a.       conduct a thorough research

b.      Get in touch with an expert at 18^th DigiTech, an award-winning digital agency and an Adobe Gold Solution Partner. Having catered to several leading brands across the globe, we are confident that we will understand and assist you in creating an exclusive eCommerce store powered by Magento 2’s latest version.